For many reasons, I am loath to write on political topics. The chief reason is that I am not an expert on politics, or even particularly “political” in the popular sense. Furthermore, most of us are already suffocating in the foul air of political commentary, most of it evanescent and a good deal of it annoying. But now and again I, like so many others, do get provoked by the unintelligent, inefficient, and slothful actions of way too many of our elected representatives. That so many such people get elected in the first place is extraordinary. The history of our country, for all its failures as yet to honor its original hopes, has been driven by intelligence, innovation, and competence. But our current Congress is by the standards of any self-respecting body requiring reflection and cooperation to arrive at effective joint action, simply incompetent.
If we really revered the Founders, we might pay more attention to the dangers that many of them saw in the excesseses of party feeling. This particular mess was principally (though not exclusively) the work of a few fanatically self-righteous Republicans; but this few is enabled by the pusillanimity of many others in their party. At the top of the agenda of the piously invoked “people’s business” is self-preservation, holding onto office at whatever price. Donald Trump is not the cause of the enfeeblement of American democracy, but the result of it. What is wrong with American democracy is the democrats. I do not refer here to the members of a particular political party, though they do play their role, but to the demos, the people, the electorate. We have met the enemy, and it is definitely us.
It was never as though the continuing existence of the United States, let alone its rise to world prominence, was a foregone conclusion from the moment they cleaned up the battlefield at Yorktown. There is a famous anecdote concerning Benjamin Franklin recorded in the journal of a Maryland delegate to the Continental Congress. You probably know it. I hope it’s authentic, though it doesn’t really matter, because it is certainly true. As the Congress completed its work, a Philadelphia lady ran into the sage philosopher on the street and asked him, “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”–“A republic,” was Franklin’s reply, “if you can keep it.’” Well, they did keep it for a while, but it was often pretty touch and go, until by about 1858 it became obvious that for a lot of influential and unhappy campers in the South it was likely to be simply go. Efforts to keep it had to become even more strenuous. Was the idea of “democracy” even realistic? In his immortal speech on the battlefield at Gettysburg—a speech more consequential even than the epic battle it memorialized, one sage auditor noted—President Lincoln characterized the still young and embattled nation as one “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the propositions that all men are created equal.” He continued, “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation , or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
The question remains current. History is always enriched by myth, and if the myth can contain a little something lost in translation, all the better. The Chinese leader Zhou-en-Lai was supposedly asked what he considered the most important consequences of the Paris student “revolution” of 1968. “Too soon to tell,” he replied. This banal comment has become an apothegm of profound Confucian wisdom on the assumption that the question referred to the French Revolution (1789). Because it really is too soon to tell whether our country can long endure. The republican ideal can be kept alive only if we keep trying to refine and expand it.
“Democracy”
is an imperfect system of majority rule,
not a license for minority obstruction. In
fact, Kevin McCarthy’s principal crime, in the eyes of his extreme adversaries,
was the act of bipartisanship—a tepid and coerced one admittedly—that actually
broke a legislative logjam, temporarily resolved the immediate problem, and
allowed the House to function. His crime
was dealing with Democrats, who hold about 49% of the seats in the House and
51% of those in the Senate. Those
statistics are not of the sort to encourage any realistic, patriotic legislator
of either party to claim an overwhelming mandate absolving them of the
obligation of compromise, and serious compromise at that.
That is what is required of elected representatives, but there is a prior requirement for those who elect them. That is a certain minimal knowledge of the structures of constituted government and a certain minimal participation in their operations. I am not talking about what is needed for a college degree in political science. I am talking about knowing what the three constitutional branches of government are and do, the distinctiveness of our bicameral legislature, the names and broadly espoused policies of our own elected representatives, and at least a little about the systems operating in our own state and local governments. Study after study has revealed vast swathes of the American electorate to be ignorant of these most elementary of matters.
A march of malcontent fascists with tiki torches spewing vile into the streets of Charlottesville is hardly a good advertisement for the state of American democracy; yet I doubt that the Union troops at Shiloh would have found in them the mortal threats to our national existence that a good deal of over-heated rhetoric coming from the punditocracy now suggests. Those men knew what a real mortal threat was. The tiki-torchers are at best, and worst, the emblems of serious political pathology. But there are upwards of three hundred and thirty millions of Americans. Surely you can find three hundred of them to march in support of any benighted idea you come up with, including axe murder. We need a serious national “back to basics” political review. I think what we need is three or thirty million of us marching in support of calling for a Constitutional Convention. A certain amount has happened in the political, technological, and industrial world since the late eighteenth century. You have probably noticed. The authors of the Constitution hoped they were enshrining some immortal ideas, but not even the pious among them aimed for a sacred book. The Founders believed that amendment would be continuous and frequent. Some argued for a constitutional convention every five years by statute for purposes of review and probable updating. For many civil libertarians the most important part of this most important document is the so-called “Bill of Rights,” the first ten amendments added to the document virtually while its ink was still tacky. You might say the sainted Founders forgot the most important part their first try. But all too soon a brilliantly original and experimental document became for many a kind of textual fetish. One of the grievances of the so-called Russian Orthodox “Old Believers” was the orthographic modernization of the spelling of the name of Jesus in a seventeenth-century Bible. So easily can the letter stifle the spirit. We can do better—which is the meaning of the word amendment—but will we?
